Lisbet Sunshine's Trials-Day Plans Include Baseball Game

Wednesday, April 9, 2008, 11:34 am

A "relative latecomer" to running, Sunshine, now 44 and a mother of three, "managed to drift into sports where there was a lot of beer involved, like rugby and sailing" while she was at Yale. But she qualified for Olympic Marathon Trials in Boston with a 2:44:16 at St. George in Utah in 2006 - a personal best, 21 seconds faster than she'd run back in 1991. She warns other 2:44ish runners at the Trials, "unless you are a serious contender for an Olympic spot, enjoy the hoopla and don’t spend too much time around stressed-out runners before the race." Her goal in Boston is "to finish in the top half . . . and to take my 6-year-old son to his first game at Fenway Park that afternoon." Sunshine is the Director of Government Relations at San Francisco State University and was part of the Bay Area Sports Organizing Committee which put together San Francisco’s Olympic bid - and lost out to Chicago as the U.S. Olympic Committee's candidate for the 2016 Games. More